Today's Hungary and Trianon

A few weeks ago one of the Hungarian television stations, ATV, began a new program. Every Monday night there are discussions with politicians about topics that in one way or another are related to the elections and the election campaign. This week the topic was the Hungarian government's attitude toward the Hungarian minorities living in the neighboring countries. This is a very complex question. Although the Hungarian constitution mentions the government's obligations toward Hungarians living outside the borders, just what these obligations are and how they are best met remain undefined.

At this week's discussion all parliamentary parties were represented. There was general agreement on most of the issues among the politicians of MSZP, SZDSZ, and MDF. The right wing represented by István Simicskó, currently sitting with the KDNP delegation, often stood apart.

There was absolute consensus that during the so-called socialist period the Treaty of Trianon and its consequences belonged to the list of forbidden topics. All national issues were considered to be secondary to internationalism and within that the "brotherhood of socialist countries" of the Soviet bloc. But this "brotherhood" was of a peculiar sort. At one point, for instance, travel being neighbors was restricted and in Romania a Hungarian visitor couldn't stay with relatives or friends while traveling in the country.

A large, two-volume history of Hungary published in 1964 mentioned Trianon only in passing and even then merely as an excuse to turn the masses' attention away from the difficult situation of the "working classes." The "ruling classes" tried to portray Trianon as the cause of all social problems, but "although Trianon brought a significant change in the economic structure of the country it could have been remedied by correct economic policies." End of story. It was only in the late 1970s that one could read a sentence or two about the general trauma that Trianon caused. It was only in the 1980s that historians admitted that it was not only the ruling classes who were affected by the loss of territories but the whole population.

Thus the topic wasn't discussed, analyzed, digested. Then came the change of regime and suddenly one could talk about Trianon, but the ignorance of the topic was and still is staggering. For example, most people don't know anything about the ethnic makeup of Greater Hungary. Here are some figures taken from my precious 1910 census. Hungary proper (not including Croatia-Slavonia) had a population of 18,264,533. Of these only 9,944,627 claimed that they spoke Hungarian most fluently. Thus, 54.5% of the population.

As a result of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary proper was reduced to less than one-third (32.6%) of her pre-war area and a little over two-fifths (41.6%) of her population. In the areas that ended up on the Czechoslovak side, there were 893,586 Magyar speakers according to the 1910 census. The Czechoslovak census of 1921, presumably in an attempt to minimize the Hungarian head count, counted Jews, practically all Hungarian speaking, separately. In 1921 Czechoslovakia claimed only 634,827 Hungarians and 70,522 Jews. In Ruthenia, currently belonging to Ukraine but between the two wars part of Czechoslovakia, there were 319,361 Ruthenians speaking a couple of dialects of Ukrainian and 169,434 Hungarians in 1910.

The territories ceded to Romania had 2,800,073 Romanians, 1,704,851 Hungarians, and 559,824 Germans. Even in Transylvania proper the Romanians outnumbered the Hungarians: almost 1,500,000 Romanians and slightly over 900,000 Hungarians.

Voivodina, given to Yugoslavia, was extremely mixed: there were 454,906 Serbs, 441,787 Hungarians, 311,162 Germans, and 71,788 Romanians. Here is the famous ethnic map of Hungary created to back up Hungary's claims at the Paris Peace Conference.

 

As one can see from this map the borders could have been drawn much more "justly," meaning more closely along ethnic lines, especially in the north and to some extent on the east. As far as the south was concerned the ethnic mix was such that one could simply have split the area in half. Some Serbs and Germans would have remained in Hungary while some Hungarians and Germans would have become citizens of Yugoslavia.

Most Hungarians, and not just the younger generation, have no idea about the ethnic composition of Greater Hungary. Between the two world wars the irrendentist propaganda was based on the mistaken notion that the only solution to Trianon was the complete restoration of Greater Hungary. The Hungarian people, surely terribly hurt and disappointed, should have been told that only certain territories might be regained and even then only under the most auspicious international circumstances. Because revisionism was the cornerstone of Hungarian foreign policy it was almosts inevitable that Hungary would end up on the side of Germany, the country dissatisfied with the status quo.

I might add here that there were moments when not all looked that bleak. Great Britain, for example, eventually became aware of the pitfalls of the draconian peace treaty of Trianon and urged the Hungarians in 1938 to be patient. The Soviet Union also promised favorable consideration after the war if Hungary didn't join Germany's war against the Soviet Union.

But how long could the country's neutrality have been maintained if the Hungarians had listened to the Allies? Sooner or later, I think, it was inevitable that Germany would have invaded the country. In that case the only way to salvage the situation would have been to set up a government-in-exile that would have been able to remain free of any charge of collaboration. In that case it is possible that Hungary would have regained some of her lost territories inhabited mostly by Hungarians.

Of course, these are just fanciful speculations. The fact is that the situation was extremely difficult because of Hungary's geopolitical position. The other day when I was reading Jobbik's campaign program in which the authors stated that Hungary's geopolitical situation is excellent, I wondered what on earth they are talking about. Hungary is surrounded by seven countries. I don't know whether this is a record or not, but it must be up there somewhere. In any event, I don't think that there were too many choices in those days, but the road Hungary took from 1933 on was perhaps one of the worst.

Comments

[whoever]

Great post, Eva, thanks for this. Think you nailed it.

[WW1]

How the USA entered in WW1. A film about the British liar war-propaganda. It produced by leader academic historians and experts of the era. It contains 5 short part.
The first starting part is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_FAOk4uMp8&feature=related

[WW1]

What do you think, Why did the opinion of leader american academic historians change about ww1 and president Wilson?

[WW1]

It's a really great documentary film!

[M.J.]

Even serious Hungarians tend to stick to the 1910 census as Christian fundamentalists to the Bible. The 1910 census was made in a specific context, and its results were also a consequence of specific political action for a couple of decades.
More importantly: by sticking to the idea that there was a real trauma because of the way borders were drafted, by still requesting that some fantasised injustice made to Hungarians must be recognised, not only are you delaying any healing process but you are also still giving credentials to politicians pushing for blood politics, for ethnic cleansing (like jobbik).
If for example most of Slovaks would think like most of Hungarians do still today, they would have just assimilated ethnic Hungarians on what is now Slovak territory. The ethnic map would look different, and there would be no argument anymore.
By the way, Hungarians did just exactly that after WWI - they "cleaned" what is now Hungary from many and still numerous "minorities" like Germans, Slovaks...etc.
For instance, if there were 600000-800000 Hungarian speaking people in Czechoslovakia after Trianon, there were 250000-450000 Slovak speaking people in Hungary after Trianon.
Today, you still have 500000-600000 Hungarian speaking people in Slovakia, and a maximum 10000 Slovak speaking people in Hungary. And true - there's no minority issue left in Hungary.
You want Hungary's neighbours to practice the same kind of policies that would lead to the same kind of result?
Then go on weeping about Trianon's pretended injustice and waving with maps of 1910.
The other possibility is to start thinking in broader terms, and even try to understand whether there actually isn't a little bit of truth about the allegation that Hungarian speaking nobility has been consistently using nationalism as a way to keep its political and economical dominance...

[Pistefka]

Hungary does have rather a lot of neighbours, which set me to wondering if there are many other European countries with similar good fortune. It seems that there are quite a few:

Germany 9
Poland 7
Serbia 8
France 7 (+Andorra)
Austria 7 (+Liechtenstein)
Ukraine 7

The first three on the list certainly saw a number of territorial changes in the twentieth century. I would imagine there are rather a lot of irredentist Serbs, but I can't imagine too many Germans walking around with Grossdeutschland T-shirts and patches - they would probably get arrested.
As for the Poles, they lost vast swathes of territory after World War 2, in the east of the country. Most of these territories had a similar population profile to Transylvania in 1919 - an overall majority of non-Poles (as defined by language and religious affiliation), but in the majority in most large towns.
As Poland was also given sizeable chunks of German territory, which they would probably never have dreamt of occupying before World War 1, they perhaps should be expected not to feel too aggrieved.
Many Poles today will call Vilnius Wilno and Lviv Lwów, but I can't recall ever seeing maps of the old Poland outside of history books - certainly not on anyone's clothing or living room wall. Then again, there are not all that many 'stranded' ethnic Poles living in the neighbouring countries - although there are enough in Czech Republic and Ukraine to have their own newspapers and so forth.

[Benes' nazi idea for ethnic cleaning of Czechoslovakia]

For Slovak MJ: There aren't political party in Hungary which spoke about ethnic cleaning, it just your fantasy. Slovaks dissaperared from Hungary due to the agreement between Stalin and your president E.Benes. They forced nazi-style ethnic swapping (Slovaks were tranfered to Czecho-Slovakia and Hungarians were transfered from Czechoslovakia to Hungary.
There is a good short film about nazi-style idea of Benes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HreyLc6LqXo A good film for everybody.

[Eva S. Balogh]

MJ: "Even serious Hungarians tend to stick to the 1910 census as Christian fundamentalists to the Bible."

You have to stick to it because that was the official census. All censuses are made in "specific context." As did the Czechoslovak or the Romanian ones between the two world wars. People declare themselves belonging to this or that ethnic group according to what they consider to be advantageous. In 1910 it was advantageous to declare themselves to be Hungarians while later to be Slovaks or Romanians. It is that simple.

[Pat]

Eva, I recall once reading interesting figures about the "German" (or perhaps it was "German speaking", I'm not sure) population of Budapest in the 1910 census. Do you have those figures?

[Pat]

I love that map which you posted. Does anyone have a version of this superimposed with today's borders?

[ww1]

A FILM about W.Wilson and WW1.
It contains 5 short part.
The first starting part is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_FAOk4uMp8&feature=related

Eva, did you see this film?

[Eva S. Balogh]

Pat: "Eva, I recall once reading interesting figures about the "German" (or perhaps it was "German speaking", I'm not sure) population of Budapest in the 1910 census. Do you have those figures?"

At your service. The population of Budapest in 1910 was 880,371 out of which there were 756,070 Hungarian, 78,882 German, 20,359 Slovak speakers. The rest Ruthenians, Croats, Serbs, and "others."

[Eva S. Balogh]

Pat: "I love that map which you posted. Does anyone have a version of this superimposed with today's borders?"

If you look closer you can see today's borders marked black.

[ww1]

What about W. Wilson and British propaganda in ww1? Did you see the film?

[Eva S. Balogh]

ssw: "What about W. Wilson and British propaganda in ww1? Did you see the film?"

No, I didn't. I don't get my informations from YouTube. One of my Ph.D. minor fields was US. foreign policy. That's enough for me.

[Pat]

Thanks Eva, maybe then it was an earlier census I was recalling, which had a much higher % of "Germans". Or else I read something incorrect...

[Eva S. Balogh]

Pat: "Thanks Eva, maybe then it was an earlier census I was recalling, which had a much higher % of "Germans". Or else I read something incorrect..."

No, you were right. Until the 1830s both Buda and Pest were predominantly German towns. I will write something about this today.

[Peter Koroly]

I saw the Hungarian journalist Ferenc Szaniszló on youtube accusing Austria of having profited from Trianon.
Of course he forgot to add that most inhabitants of the Burgenland were and are German speakers. And the most important thing, they wanted rather belong to democratic Austria than to the Horthyregime.

By the way, he also accused "the Austrians and the Germans" of being "americanised", then complained "they took Jörg Haider away from us and we remained alone".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWJW7Je3xpQ

[Horthy]

"And the most important thing, they wanted rather belong to democratic Austria than to the Horthyregime." Hahaha. It is not true. They want to join to a more developed country.

Horthy had a good reputation in the pre-ww2 west.

[Vándorló]

@Pat: There are lot of really good quality open source (creative commons) maps on wikipedia. These come in a number of formats such as SVG (a form of XML), PNG etc... in various resolutions. If you use the SVG format you can then easily superimpose the various maps onto one another using freely available tools such as Inkscape. Google launched soem tools before Christmas allowing native support for SVG by rendering them in flash even in IE, using their Chrome plugin for IE (search for Scalable Vector Graphics for Web Browsers using Flash). Anyway examples of the kinds of maps on wikipedia that are excellent is one such as this of the 1910 census:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Austria_Hungary_ethnic.svg
On the de-Germanisation of Budapest there is this: "Assimilating Jews and Germans were welcomed in order to expand Magyar plurality. On the eve of World War I, Hugh Stetson-Watson made famous what he called the "racial problems" in the Hungarian borderlands. The notoriety of forced Magyarization in the schools and bureaucracy obscured the success of Magyarization in the capital. Budapest went from about 80 percent German-speaking in 1848 to about 80 percent Magyar-speaking in 1880."

I'm afraid the spam filter prevents me from posting the source, but search on "Nationalism and the Problem of Inclusion in Hungary
Author: Alice Freifeld , Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida, FL, and a former Title VIII-supported EES Short-term Scholar"

[Eva S. Balogh]

Peter Koroly: "saw the Hungarian journalist Ferenc Szaniszló on youtube accusing Austria of having profited from Trianon."

I don't know whether Szaniszló is a journalist or not, but rarely one can hear so much stupidity in one place as he managed to put together. Absolutely mind-boggling. He is surely not quite normal, but why he is allowed to tell all that nonsense on television?

[Eva S. Balogh]

Horty: "They want to join to a more developed country. Horthy had a good reputation in the pre-ww2 west."

Well, there are a couple things wrong here. The Austrians put in a request to the Peace Conference about Western Hungary before Horthy became governor. Second, Austria in those days were not so much more developed than Hungary.

[Mihai]

Eva, I am Romanian and I agree with you that the border between Romania and Hungary could have been drawn more justly. There are some Hungarian populated areas along the border that normally should have been given to Hungary.
They were not because the Romanian leaders of that time insisted to get as much of what we call the Western plain as possible. The economic argument trumped the ethnic one.

However, just by looking at your map one can see that it had a political purpose. Yes, Transylvania is more mountainous than Hungary but even non-mountainous areas in the center of the region are shown as being uninhabited or sparsely populated while almost the whole Hungarian plain looks populated.
Not to speak about the choice of colors to depict the various ethnic groups. Actually it's ok, they could have used white to depict the Romanians :-)

[Eva S. Balogh]

Hi Mihai, as usual a very good comment.

As for the Romanian-Hungarian border. I read the discussions of the committee that drew the Romanian-Hungarian borders. One copy of these transcripts is available in the Yale archives (Colonel House willed his papers to Yale.) From these transcripts it is clear that the line was drawn the way it was because Bratianu wanted to have the railway line going from Nagykároly to Arad in Romanian hands. That was really Romania's minimum demand, especially if you compare it to the 1916 Treaty of Bucharest.

As for the colors depicting the different nationalities, you're of course perfectly right. The map makers picked the very vivid red for the Hungarians because this color gave the impression that the Hungarians were more numerous than in reality. The problem is that because of a very pale lavender color the map makers picked for the Romanians is hardly distinguishable from white depicting uninhabited areas. It was a clever trick. Imagine what would have happened if they picked dark blue!

How accurately the uninhabited areas are drawn, I really don't know. Surely, the whole of Mecsek is not totally devoid of people. I have never been in the Hortobány area but it is possible that no one in his right mind wants to live there.

[whoever]

I've never really understood why Transylvania didn't revert to being an independent mini-state, such as Luxembourg. Of course, this wouldn't have resolved all of the tensions between Hungary and Romania in one swoop, but surely one of the best antidotes to revisionism would have been reconstituting an "independent" Transylvania, with strong links to both Hungary and Romania.

Question is; would Romania and Hungary have fought for control of Transylvania by proxy? I would argue that pragmatic politicians would have begun to define an independent course for the small country, thereby preventing ethnic tension becoming unbearable.

The economic factors that Eva refers to are a large element to difficulties faced by the responsible parties, in the absence of trade/co-operation agreements.

Maybe someone can confirm the position of the French? Were they really so biased towards Romania as is portrayed?